The Invention of David Bowie

an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 23–August 11, 2013

Catalog edited by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, with contributions by Camille Paglia, Jon Savage, and others
London: V&A Publishing, 320 pp., $55.00 (distributed in the US by Abrams)

The Next Day

an album by David Bowie

Masayoshi Sukita/David Bowie Archive

David Bowie in the ‘Tokyo Pop’ vinyl bodysuit that Yamamoto Kansai designed for his Aladdin Sane tour, 1973

1.

Every time I thought I’d got it made It seemed the taste was not so sweet So I turned myself to face me But I’ve never caught a glimpse Of how the others must see the faker I’m much too fast to take that test

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes…

—David Bowie, “Changes,” Hunky Dory, 1971

David Bowie: “My trousers changed the world.” A fashionable man in dark glasses: “I think it was more the shoes.” Bowie: “It was the shoes.”* He laughed. It was a joke. Up to a point.

There is no question that Bowie changed the way many people looked, in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag, are legendary. Young people all over the world tried to dress like him, look like him, move like him—alas, with rather variable results.

So it is entirely fitting that the Victoria and Albert Museum should stage a huge exhibition of Bowie’s stage clothes, as well as music videos, handwritten song lyrics, film clips, artworks, scripts, storyboards, and other Bowieana from his personal archive. Apart from everything else, Bowie’s art is about style, high and low, and style is a serious business for a museum of art and design.

One of the characteristics of rock music is that so much of it involves posing, or “role-playing,” as they say in the sex manuals. Rock is above all a theatrical form. English rockers have been particularly good at this, partly because many of them, including Bowie himself, have drawn inspiration from the rich tradition of music hall theater. If Chuck Berry was a godfather of British rock, so was the vaudevillian Max Miller, the “cheeky chappie,” in his daisy-patterned suits. But there is another reason: rock and roll being American in origin, English musicians often started off mimicking Americans. More than that, in the 1960s especially, white English boys imitated black Americans. Then there was the matter of class: working-class English kids posing as aristocratic fops, and solidly middle-class young men affecting Cockney accents. And the gender-bending: Mick Jagger wriggling his hips like Tina Turner, Ray Davies of the Kinks camping it up like a pantomime dame, David Bowie dressing like Marlene Dietrich and shrieking like Little Richard. And none of them was gay, at least not most of the time. Rock, English rock especially, has often seemed like a huge, anarchic dressing-up party.

No one took this further, with more imagination and daring, than David Bowie. At a time when American groups would often dress down—affluent suburban kids disguised as Appalachian farmers or Canadian lumberjacks—Bowie quite deliberately…

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